Collaborative Ecosystems Foster Innovation and Customer Experience

The scale of the Covid-19 crisis has emphasised the need for change. Supply chain fragility, remote working and rapidly evolving markets have led to an increased need to innovate, build resilience and deliver great customer experiences.

The most successful businesses to do this are those that create extended, partner-inclusive ecosystems designed for sharing information across lines of business, and other companies. Collaboration is, it seems, a competitive advantage.

As PwC claims, “to deliver true innovation you have to bring together the best talent, IP and technology, at greater speed, agility and scale than ever before. Digital ecosystems help to deliver this.”

Building bridges

Being collaborative and cooperative leaders of interconnected enterprises is all very well, but how do you get there? While according to McKinsey, 71 percent of consumers are ready for integrated, ecosystem offerings, can the same be said of brands and suppliers?

Culturally, it may go against the grain – but businesses need to think collaboratively, even with competitors, to enhance solutions and deliver lasting customer experiences. According to the Harvard Business Review, “most of today’s fastest-growing companies — from Amazon and Google to Alibaba and Tencent, to Uber and WeWork — are explicitly positioning themselves as ecosystem players, as hubs within networks of customers, suppliers, and producers of complementary services.”

Collaborative problem-solving and enablement

Becoming a leading business with next-generation partners requires transparency across numerous planes of operability. This allows all parties to enjoy end-to-end, big-picture visibility through shared data.

The greater the ‘outside-in’ integration of revenue-producing business processes and information, the less guesswork involved in collaborative problem-solving. What’s more, such cross-business transparency also drives trust and enablement. And, this increases the likelihood of agile and successful solutions drawn from a wide bank of innovation, often spanning numerous sectors and specialisms.

Success feeds success with a collaborative mindset

In a fully-fledged open ecosystem, everyone has something to gain. The sharing of cross-industry expertise allows smaller businesses to scale, increase reach and win over new customers. For bigger enterprises, innovative new technologies and agile ways of working are brought to their attention by start-up partners. More products and services mean more customers and better experiences. More data will lead to increased intelligence, better offerings, happier customers and more loyalty.

Epos Now: Maintaining a culture of collaboration

One company that has already recognised this is Epos Now, a cloud-based software provider that brings electric point of sales (EPOS) to companies around the world. After its rapid growth of over 100,000 sales in just four years, the business needed to ensure its expanding team could keep up and maintain its exceptional customer service. Collaboration was key.

Epos Now deployed Salesforce’s Service Cloud, an end-to-end engagement platform designed to deliver business agility and visibility, by uniting entire support teams with the apps, experts, and data they need to solve problems faster than ever before. This resulted in greater customer satisfaction and an eight percent increase in conversion rates.

From our collaboration with Deloitte, powering their DigitalMIX solution, to our AppExchange and our commitment to sharing data, we are built on the fundamental premise that collaboration drives success.